Bold Counsel (The Trials of Sarah Newby) (38 page)

‘Where’s Peter Barton, sir?’

‘Exactly. Where is the bastard? Any news on that?’

‘None, sir, I’m afraid. We’ve circulated his description nationwide, but no joy so far. There’s more to that lad than meets the eye, it seems. If he can disappear so completely.’

‘Do you think it was him?’

‘It could be, sir, obviously. We’ll know for certain when we get the lab report on that scrap of cloth the SOCOs found on the barbed wire fence. They’re still working on that apparently. Staff shortages over the Christmas period.’ Jane grimaced contemptuously. ‘But he has to be top of the list. These other assaults almost look like he was practising. Working himself up for the big one. In which case, what if he’s got a taste for it, and does it again?’

‘Then we’re in trouble,’ Terry agreed. ‘But what’s his motive?’

Jane frowned. It seemed obvious to her. ‘He’s a pervert - he was spurned by women in his childhood, so he’s out for revenge. He gets his kicks from stalking single women.’

They were sitting in the incident room, its walls covered with photographs and maps of the crime scene and surrounding area. A dotted green line led from the bridleway to Alison Grey’s house. A similar dotted line in red led from the house to the gateway where the Nissan Primera had been seen. Terry drummed his fingers on the map thoughtfully.

‘I know, there are a lot of similarities with those earlier assaults, but there are differences too. Quite significant differences at that.’

‘Like what, sir?’

‘Well, for a start, look at this place, Crockey Hill.’ He tapped the board with his hand. ‘It’s not even a village - just a road junction with a few houses and a filling station. Much more remote than the other places he’s been. And that bridleway’s hardly used. Would you run there now, through all those damp woods? I wouldn’t.’

‘You’re not a serial killer, sir.’

Terry raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, thank you, sergeant, for those kind words. But if I
was
a serial killer, or sexual pervert, whatever, I guess my ardour would be pretty much diminished by all the cold damp mud I had to plough through to get to my victim. And there’s another point, too. How did he know she was living there alone in the first place?’

Jane shrugged. ‘He scouted through the woods, sir, I suppose.’

‘You suppose.’ Terry turned back to the map. ‘Look where this house is, sergeant. It’s down a track a hundred yards from the road, with a field and strip of woodland behind it. Young Peter coming along this bridleway is
behind
those woods, isn’t he? Where he can’t even see this house and has no reason to know that it exists, let alone that it’s occupied by a single woman.’

‘Maybe he deliberately set out to search for victims, sir. If Mrs Richards hadn’t come out with a dog, he might have attacked her.’

‘Well, maybe you’re right. But you know as well as I do that 90% of murders aren’t committed by strangers at all, but by someone well known to the victim. She had condoms in her bedroom, she must have had a boyfriend. What if it was some jealous lover who killed her, not Peter Barton at all? The guy who gave her that scarf, perhaps?’

Jane’s eyes met his thoughtfully. ‘You may be right, sir, but if she
did
have another lover, he was unusually careful to cover his tracks. I’ve been through all the e-mails on her computer, and there’s nothing even mildly flirtatious. Just gossip to friends and colleagues - most of them in other countries - and a lot of detailed stuff about this book she was writing.’

‘So they got in touch by phone, then. Must have done.’

‘Right. Only her phone’s missing. So if they sent each other texts we can’t read those either, not yet anyway. I’ve got T-mobile working on that, but it’s going to take some time. They’re going through the numbers on her phone bill one by one. But if they don’t come up with anything we’ve still got Peter Barton to find.’ She sighed. ‘It’s still very possible that she was killed by an intruder. Either someone who came up the bridleway through the woods, or the driver of the red Primera.’

‘The first thing to establish, is exactly what happened that night,’ Terry agreed. ‘And in what order. How, exactly, did the killer - whoever he was - persuade her to stand on that chair, naked, with a scarf round her neck?’

‘She’d just had a bath, we know that much. There was a residue of foam around the sides of the tub,’ Jane insisted. ‘He came upstairs, surprised her in the bath or the bathroom ...’

‘Wearing what, exactly, on his feet?’ Terry asked pointedly. ‘Shoes that left no trace?’ The lack of footprints was a weak point in the intruder theory, they both knew. If the killer had come from the bridleway, he would have passed through woods where the ground was damp with mud and leafmould, before crossing a carrot field covered with straw. Yet there was no mud, straw or leafmould in the rooms upstairs.

‘There were a couple of wisps of straw downstairs,’ Jane said. ‘And mud - in the loo and the hall. Quite a lot of it.’

‘Dropped by our fine young constables,’ Terry said dismissively. ‘Rushing through the flower bed to the window. Why none upstairs, that’s the question?’

‘Maybe he took his shoes off.’ Jane suggested. ‘In order to make less noise.’

‘Then why no fibres from his socks?’ Terry asked. ‘One of those would be soaked in DNA, if they’re anything like mine. We’d have him. Only there aren’t any.’

Jane shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe he never went upstairs at all. Maybe she got out of the bath and came downstairs in her dressing gown, or with a towel wrapped round her, and he surprised her in the hall.’

‘Why would she do that?’

‘What, come downstairs? To feed the cat, maybe. Make herself a warm drink. Or perhaps she heard a noise and came down to see what it was.’

‘Would you do that? Get out of the bath and come downstairs? A single woman, alone?’

‘Not if I thought the noise was a burglar, no. But if I thought it was the cat, knocking over a cup or something, then maybe.’

Terry shuddered, imagining the mind-numbing shock poor Alison Grey had faced, if this scenario was true. Alone in that house, half naked, attacked by a strange man in the hall. ‘That could explain why there was no sign of a struggle,’ he said. ‘She’d have been frozen by panic.’

‘Quite. Then he taped her hands, made a noose with the scarf, and it was too late.’

‘Where did he get the scarf?’

‘There’s a coat cupboard just inside the front door. Either that, or he brought it with him.’

‘And yet there’s no trace of his DNA on it anywhere,’ Terry mused. ‘That’s what gets me. He’d be sweating, bound to be. Hyped up with excitement. But nothing. He must have worn gloves.’

‘So he came prepared. Like Peter Barton did, in Lizzie Bolan’s house.’

‘Maybe,’ Terry said. ‘But I’m still not wholly convinced about this intruder theory. As you know.’

‘You think it could have been her lover?’

‘Yes. Look at it this way, sergeant. There were those scars on her buttocks, don’t forget. That’s not the sort of thing Peter Barton’s ever done - not so far, anyway. It looks more like some perverted sex game. And there’s no proof - no definite proof - that anyone broke into this house at all. He could have come through the loo window, I grant you, but our young constables blundered through there too, so that mud in the hall could have come from them. All this about the woman coming downstairs
could
have happened, I suppose, but it’s not particularly likely, is it? If she heard a burglar, she’d have shut herself in her bedroom and phoned 999 ...’

‘If she could find her mobile,’ Jane said. ‘We can’t.’

‘Well, exactly,’ Terry said. ‘Maybe she tried, and he snatched it out of her hands. But let’s stick with Alison for a moment. If the cat needed feeding, you’d think she’d do it before she had a bath, wouldn’t you? Or if she forgot, get herself properly dried and ready for bed before she came down. Whereas your theory has her walking downstairs half naked immediately after her bath, just exactly at the moment the intruder appears, simply to account for the lack of mud upstairs. Whereas if there
was
no intruder ...’

‘There wouldn’t have been any mud,’ Jane said smoothly.

‘Which may have come from our constables, sadly.’ Terry sighed. ‘Look, what if the killer was someone she knew? A man she’d let into the house quite willingly? Someone she was relaxed about having a bath in front of? Someone she might stand in front of naked? Remember, somebody caned her. And the shower head was raised too high for a woman, so it’s likely the man took a shower afterwards. Or before.’

‘All right, but how come he left no trace? No male hairs in the bathtub? Or on her body?’

‘She washed them away in the bath.’

‘No DNA on the scarf?’

‘He wore gloves. He was careful.’ It was Terry’s turn to shrug, Jane’s to look sceptical.

‘He’s her lover. A man she trusts enough to stand naked in front of, you say. She lets him whip her. And he’s wearing gloves? Sounds kinky to me. Anyway, where’s the whip?’

‘Maybe he took it with him. He’d guess we could get DNA from it. After she was dead, he’d try to clean up.’

‘He couldn’t clean everything. There must be traces of him somewhere in the house.’

‘There are. There are fingerprints everywhere. Most of them unidentified. None belonging to Peter Barton, remember. The only male ones we’ve identified belong to her landlord, Michael Parker. He visited her two days before, he says, to check her central heating.’

‘So could he be your man, her secret lover?’

Terry shrugged. ‘No evidence of that so far. He was near Scarborough when she died, he says, with some builders he employs. She phoned his office a couple of times in the last month, but not often. Still, he’s on my list. I’ll check on him further ...’

‘Well, if it was someone she knew, how did he get to the house, without anyone seeing?’

‘By car. He drove there, sometime after dark. No one would notice, why should they? The neighbour’s quarter of a mile off anyway, it’s cold and dark, and he parks round the side out of sight.’

‘So this man murders his mistress, walks out the front door, drops the latch, and drives away. Is that your theory?’

‘Yes. Not switching his headlights on until he reaches the road, perhaps,’ Terry said. ‘That’s what I’d do, in his position.’

‘Why?’

‘So no one would see me.’

‘No sir. I mean why kill your mistress, if that’s what she was? Deliberately, wearing gloves to avoid detection? And hanging her up in the hall like that, to make it look like suicide?’

‘Or to humiliate her.’

‘Or to humiliate her, yes, in front of the mirror. Scare her shitless, in fact, poor lady.’

‘Yes. Well, maybe that’s the point. He hated her so much, he planned it carefully. He almost got away with the suicide idea, too. He would have, if it hadn’t been for the tape marks on her wrists.’

‘And the scars on her buttocks, the knife mark on her throat. You think her lover carries a knife?’

Terry hesitated. ‘That, I grant you, is less likely.’

‘Or gloves?’

‘I’m not saying this is a crime of passion - something spontaneous that got out of control. It looks deliberate to me. He came there planning to do this.’

‘Which fits the intruder. Peter Barton. Or some other pervert. Someone who just thinks of her as a woman, not a person at all. An object to revenge himself on.’

‘Not necessarily. You’re forgetting how it was made to look like suicide. And the fact that she was suffering from cancer. A lover could have known that, planned to kill her, and disguise it as suicide, thinking he’d get away with it. He might have, too, if the pathologist hadn’t noticed those tape marks on the wrists.’

‘But why? What’s the motive?’

Terry frowned. ‘Could be anything. People do strange things when they’re in love. Maybe it was simple jealousy - she’d deceived him with another man, perhaps the guy who’d given her that scarf. Or maybe she threatened to tell his wife - tried to blackmail him somehow. Anything like that. Perhaps love just turned to hate. It happens sometimes, so they say.’

‘There’s no evidence of any of this.’

‘There’s no evidence of your intruder.’

‘Yes, sir, there is. There’s the jogger Mrs Richards saw ...’

‘Two days before. Could have been anyone.’

‘And the scrap of cloth snagged on the barbed wire, the open window, the mud in the loo and the hall ...’

‘Could have been our constables.’

‘Or the killer. Then there’s the red Primera parked in the gateway.’

‘Young lovers, probably.’ Terry shrugged. ‘You’re right, we shouldn’t exclude it, I suppose.’

‘And most of all, there’s Peter Barton,’ Jane persisted. ‘With a nutcase like him on the loose, all this is a bit academic.’

‘I know, I know,’ Terry conceded. ‘The sooner we catch the young bastard the better. It could easily be him. But it doesn’t feel right, somehow. There’s something we’re missing. Something about the woman herself.’ He paced across the room, thinking. ‘We need to know more about her. Why she came to live in York, who her friends and enemies were, that sort of thing.’ He smiled. ‘And who she was sleeping with. That’s the lad who did it, in my book.’

42. Quick Sale

T
HE PHONE call came as a surprise. Sarah was at her desk, deep in preparation for her fraud trial. It was Friday afternoon. The trial began on Monday, and she’d set aside this afternoon for preparation. But her client’s bank statements were more complicated than expected, and she had only an hour before she had to leave. She had promised to meet Michael Parker that evening, and was beginning to wish she hadn’t. The last thing she needed now was an interruption.

‘Mrs Newby? This is Simon Marlow, of Strutt and Pollock.’

‘Who?’ She didn’t recognize the voice.

‘Strutt and Pollock, the estate agents, Mrs Newby.’

‘Oh yes, of course. Mr Marlow.’ She remembered the young man who’d shown people round her house before Christmas.

‘We’ve had an offer on your house.’

‘Really? Good heavens.’ She’d been so busy over the past few weeks, her thoughts full of Lorraine’s pregnancy, this coming fraud trial, and Emily’s skiing holiday, that she’d almost forgotten that the house was for sale at all. The sale board in the garden had become an established fixture; on Boxing Day morning, Emily had hung nuts from it for the birds. ‘How much?’